The idea started simply…

I hadn’t really thought of it, you know, as a big problem. i hadn’t really thought of it much at all.

Only thing i knew was that life had been simpler before, easier to understand…. smaller. And most of us liked it that way.

All that was about to change…. isn’t that how most stories start?

This story starts with an ending.

I had spent 10 years fulfilling a dream. i had successfully built and operated 3 kickass restaurants/bars and i was pretty damn pleased with myself during the run.

Actually that’s not true, I was miserable most of the time, but it sure looked like I was having a blast.

Anyways, on to the beginning. The ending started ending when the cancer treatment started ending, and the beginning of our new life looked like it had a shot at working out. We didn’t have a long term outlook. We didn’t have a plan. We had a ‘put your head down, grit your teeth, and get through today’ approach that had gotten us out of the cancer, out of debt, out of partnerships with addicts and assholes, and out of the everyday shitty feeling like there’s something looming on your horizon about to kick you back down the hole you just crawled out of.

That was working great for us, but it was a far cry from where we started a decade before.

In the first year, success came slowly, fidgetting it’s way nervously towards us as we fumbled awkwardly towards it. When it finally hit, it wasn’t smooth or romantic, but a clumsy and awkward accident. Like horny teenagers fearful of catching an std from french kissing, or getting pregnant with a dry hump, success and I did everything wrong, and still ended up holding hands and smiling uneasily at each other, imagining a perfect future in a soon to be perfect world.

Optimism strapped itself on my back like a rocket pack, and i took off in exploration of a world where anything is possible if you just have the right pluck and determination, and the eye for people that dare to dream, to pick up along the way.

Some that I picked up were just as awkward with success as i, and as much as i tried to ease them into it, everyone’s first time is always weird, and scary, and gloriously exciting. Enthusiasm makes up for so much when you’re playing with impossible outcomes, and sometimes even then it’s only worth it if you’re chasing something impossible. The romantic in all of us is a sucker for staring at night skies, imagining that somewhere there must be someone as scared, as hopeful, and as tragically doomed to failure as themselves.

That romanticism saved my soul, as we negotiated booze addled poker nights of the industry’s most debaucherous card sharks, or cocktail soirees with ballerinas, champagne purveyors and wild mushroom foragers. The people who were drawn to us, were the same romantics as us, believing beyond rationality (and probably influenced by a healthy appreciation for our wares), that the impossible was indeed possible. We all hitched our wagons to each other as if to say, we’ll outnumber the bastards, and fuck em if they can’t take a joke.